Cultural policy under conditions of economic crisis Myrsini Zorba
[email protected] International Conference on Public Policy Milan, June 2015 I would like to present a few introductory remarks on cultural policy under conditions of crisis, as we experience it in my country. Public cultural policy in Greece has been proved fragile and dysfunctional, despite repeated assurances by the respective ministers, starting with Melina Mercouri during the 80s, that it is the "country's heavy industry". The model of cultural policy implemented in recent decades was a model of cultural policy in the narrow sense, centralized and attached strictly to cultural heritage (Zorba, 2009, 2011). Except in a few cases, it did not manage to open a dialogue with society and social needs. In the current crisis conditions, these characteristics exacerbate the problem, inasmuch as the deconstruction of the old statist paradigm is occurring at an explosive rate leaving in its place a residual skeleton: a skeleton that sustains the old structures, shrunken but equally ineffective as before. It is important to note that during the recent years of crisis the structure of the Ministry has undergone many changes, albeit without any fixed orientation. In 2009 it merged with Tourism, in 2012 it was downgraded to the General Secretariat of the Ministry of Education, in 2013 it became the Ministry of Culture and Sports, and in early 2015 it was again subsumed under the Ministry of Education. Four transformations within five years indicate confusion and the lack of a stable political and cultural orientation. This ambivalence creates doubt, which again increasingly weakens the possibility of cultural planning.